These luminaries and others gathered at the museum site on Grand River Avenue in East Lansing Tuesday morning to grab a shovel and nudge Hadid’s daring design from the abstract to the concrete.

With the festive tent gone, Waldman’s headaches are about to get a lot bigger. Waldman is the project manager for Southfield-based Barton Malow, general contractor for what may be the highest-profile and most unusual architectural project the state has ever seen.

“You don’t go into a Zaha Hadid building with the idea that you’re going to come out the same,” said Linda Stanford, an associate provost and architecture professor at MSU. The same might be said for any city or university bold enough to build a Hadid. A Pritzker Prize-winning “starchitect” with visionary projects blossoming around the world, Hadid has completed only one building in the U.S., the Rosenthal Center for Contemporary Art in Cincinnati.

At Tuesday’s ceremony, Hadid thanked the Broads for the “really amazing” gift that enabled her to work again in the United States, “a land where dreams come true.”

“When I was 5 or 6 years old, I thought you could reach the moon by climbing a ladder,” she said. “These dreams, especially in education, are very important. Even if you only get 95 percent of your goals, it’s still amazing.”

Hadid’s style is to sketch out curves, lines and fields of pure energy, pull them kicking and screaming into the material world and let them loose on some unsuspecting patch of Earth. Her Broad museum design is a crouching beast of angular steel plates like nothing else on the planet.

“This building should get a speeding ticket,” architecture critic and project advisor Joseph Giovannini said Tuesday.

Granholm called the design “dramatic and breathtaking.”

“This museum is going to be a tremendous visual experience,” Granholm said.

Hadid’s ultra-dynamic designs are particularly attractive to cities with something to prove.

Even Rome, the site of Hadid’s latest completed project, is using the Zaha cachet to brush up its image. In fall 2009, Hadid’s Museum of the Art of the XXIst Century, or Maxxi, was widely seen as a clear signal that the Eternal City was ready to look to the future. New York Times architecture critic Nicolai Ourousoff called the museum “a rebuke to those who still see Rome as a catalog of architectural relics for scholars or tourists.”

MSU and East Lansing are out to prove a thing or two as well.

For one thing, the old land-grant university is out to flex its growing international reach. Stanford compared the Broad Museum to other MSU ventures with international fame, such as the cyclotron and the College of Music.

Several speakers at Tuesday’s ceremony predicted a wave of international tourism.

Eugene Gargaro, board chairman of the Detroit Institute of Arts, said a million people have come to check out the museum’s $160 million renovation project.

“I believe the Broad Museum will do the same,” he said.

Closer to home, the museum’s location on the busy commercial strip along Grand River will decisively turn MSU toward its surroundings.

“We won’t have to tell you that we care about being a part of East Lansing,” Stanford said. “We’re right there, in your face, and that’s exactly what we want.”

Eli Broad said the museum would be “an important bridge to the community,” sucking in even people who are indifferent to art.

“I predict the curiosity factor will be too great for them to resist,” he said.

It took an extra year in the schedule, and $7 million to $12 million more than expected, to bring Hadid’s abstract lines of force to concrete reality. The final cost of the museum is estimated at $40 million to $45 million.

“The first piece of art you see is the building,” Waldman explained. “How do you put a time or a dollar figure to art?” But that’s just what had to happen. First, it was discovered that Hadid’s design was 15 percent bigger than the 42,000-square-foot minimum specified in the competition brief, said Craig Kiner, a member of Zaha Hadid’s team.

Hadid shrunk the building accordingly. Stanford and Waldman said the design’s unprecedented steel-clad exterior was the chief cause of the delay and cost overruns.

Kiner agreed that the envelope was “the most expensive component of the building.”

For a while, that was a major problem. A world-class museum has to maintain 50 percent humidity to keep Jackson Pollack’s drips from drying or Jeff Koons’ balloon animals from getting psoriasis. Consequently, the Broad museum will need triple-pane glass windows to keep moisture from condensing on the walls in cold weather.

Butthat made Hadid’s original design for the walls, with hundreds of metalpleats resembling biomorphic scales or feathers, problematic.

“Originally,the concept was that you would actually stack the pleats,” Waldmansaid. “They could go all the way through and be a significant part ofthe structure.”

Atfirst, Kiner said, each of the pleats in the building’s serrated skinwould be hooked up to the main frame by individual steel trusses. Theglass panels and metal pleats that make up the fašade would form anintegrated, interlinked shell. Hundreds of connecting trusses, no twoalike, would have been built by hand.

An articulated armadillo of a building would have been cool, but very expensive.

JosephGiovannini, the architect and critic who organized the Broad Museumdesign competition, has stayed on the project as a sort of kindlyuncle. Giovannini said he was worried about the way talks were goingbetween MSU and Hadid’s office.

“There’s a point at which it was fairly delicate,” he said.

“Thearchitects were pushing the envelope” on the building’s shell,Giovannini said, but they later “moderated the design” in the face ofstaggering cost estimates.

“Itwas a tense moment,” he said. After a lot of long-distance callsbetween Michigan and London, the design team worked out a compromise.The pleats will be fitted into a glaze on the outer fašade, withmatching inner pieces attached to the inside walls.

Giovannini doesn’t like the term “decorative,” but the pleats won’t be integral to the wall. Instead, they’ll screen the sun and dazzle the eye — feathers for display, not for flight.

Hadid’s team agreed to the compromise because the visual impact would be the same.

Thestainless steel panels will be made, folded, cut and bent off site,trucked in and installed in small sections as crews work around thebuilding.

That left another problem: Who can fabricate mega-cutlery on such a scale?

Afterrejecting four firms from around the world, MSU turned to the world’sforemost magician of metal: William Zahner, president of A. ZahnerCompany in Kansas City, Mo.

Doing the impossible for architects like Hadid is business as usual for Zahner.

Todress up the fašade of a Neiman Marcus store in Massachusetts, Zahnerand his team created a wavy stainless steel scarf 40 feet tall and 410feet long. They wrapped Randall Stout’s Art Gallery of Alberta in aribbon of stainless steel called the “borealis.” For Daniel Libeskind’sJewish Museum of San Francisco, Zahner crafted a blue steel fašade thatchanges color as the day goes on.

With the fašade issue resolved, Waldman found that other features were not negotiable.

Themuseum’s interior has sharply angled, sloping concrete walls Waldmancalled “magnificent,” but with a catch: “I can’t think of walls thatare more difficult to construct,” he said. In another round ofnegotiations, Waldman and his team worked out reinforcement and moldingtechniques that will maintain a 50-foot wall at a 75-degree angle, andeverybody was happy.

Unlike Giovannini, Waldman said he never doubted that the building would break ground.

“Therewere times where I thought we were far apart, but I knew that MSU andZaha Hadid were both committed,” Waldman said. “It was too great anopportunity for both sides to let it fail.”

ButHadid isn’t the only 800-pound gorilla in this gallery. There’s alsoBroad, the Detroitborn MSU alumnus who made his fortune in homebuildingand banking and now bestrides Los Angeles like a philanthropic colossus.

Broad (rhymes with “road”), one of the world’s top contemporary art collectors, pledged $28 million for the MSU museum: $21 million for construction and $7 million for acquisitions, exhibition set-up and operational expenses. It’s the largestgift in MSU’s history, but Broad, 76, has suffered some slings andarrows in the press lately over his allegedly heavy-handed ways.

Ina Feb. 8 story on Broad’s philanthropic “grip” on the Los Angelescultural scene (complete with a map), The New York Times charged Broadwith wielding an “iron checkbook,” withholding promised funds from theLos Angeles County Museum of Art when it didn’t show enough art fromthe Broad foundation’s extensive collection.

Furthermore,when the new annex to the L.A. County Museum, funded largely by Broad,opened in February 2008, Times critic Roberta Smith panned theinaugural exhibition as a “display of pricey trophies” from Broad’scollection and decried the “dismaying dance that museums must performwith their biggest donors.”

Stanford said there is an important difference between the L.A. County Museum and MSU’s Broad Museum.

“Thisis on a university campus, and I believe he fully understands that,”she said. She expects Broad to respect the autonomy of MSU’s art museumas a “public academic resource.”

“This institution has an academic responsibility to the state and to the world,” she said.

Thenew museum’s director, she said, will choose how and when to buy orshow art. “We might go the Broad Art Foundation in the same sense wewould go to the DIA or the Art Institute of Chicago,” she said.

Accordingto Stanford, the only string attached to Broad’s MSU gift is therequirement that the new museum focus on art since 1945, which Stanfordcalled “a smart move.”

“I’ve found him to be very straightforward and reasonable — very different from whatI’ve read about him in the newspaper,” Stanford said. “He’s not tellingus what to do, and I don’t think he has any intention of doing that.”

Ahigh-powered advisory board of museum experts and a consulting firm,Lord Cultural Resources, are in the early stages of working out theeducational, cultural and artistic “program” of the museum.

Meanwhile,the physical plane will take center stage. While drawing up plans forthe Broad Museum, the MSU team visited the Maxxi site with Hadid inRome last year.

There Waldman learned a lot about one of Hadid’s favorite themes, exposed concrete.

“Around here, exposed concrete is more of an industrial type look,” he said. “There, it’s part of the art.”

Waldmansaid he expects site excavation will last through early May. Then comesa giant mat foundation — a solid, two-footthick slab of concrete thatcovers the entire site and has to be poured at once. Expect an epic,10-hour-long pour with dozens of cement trucks lining Grand River onefine day at the end of May.

Concretebasement walls will be poured in June and July. In spring 2011, workwill begin on the zooming, swooping interior walls, which, oddly, willbe visible for a while before the building’s shell is built.

Theinterior concrete can’t be painted or stained, but must be blended to aprecise, uniform color throughout. (The design team is shooting forSherwin-Williams color No. 7071, “gray screen.”) The concrete is pouredinto sculpted forms, much as a sculptor would cast a giant sculpture.

That’s when Waldman expects his blood pressure to reach its highest point.

“Itputs a lot of pressure when I think of it that way,” he said. "Thesewalls are going to be there as part of the art forever.”